Ancient High Tech: The Astonishing Scientific Achievements of Early Civilizations

INTRODUCTION

Ahead of Their Time . . . and Ours

History, then, should be written in that spirit, with truthfulness and an eye to future expectations, rather than with adulation and a view to the pleasure of present praise. There is your rule and standard for impartial history! If there will be some to use this standard, it will be well, and I have written to some purpose.

LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA, THE WORKS OF LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA, 170 CE¹*

The first modern, self-igniting match was invented in 1805 by Jean Chancel, a Parisian chemist. Yet, identical sulfuric matches were in common use among Babylonians thirty-six hundred years before.¹

The flat surface of an ancient temple wall is sculpted in relief with the roughly twenty-inch-high image of a man in Hindu garb seated on a bicycle. Clearly depicted are standard handlebars, saddle, wheels, spokes, and frame, with a pedal mostly obscured by the rider’s left foot. No text accompanies the relief (fig. I.1). The carving appears in Panchavarnaswamy Temple, located in southeastern India, which is cited by name in the Thevaram, a seventh-century text written in the ancient Tamil language. Far earlier, the Greek traveler and geographer Claudius Ptolemy personally visited Panchavarnaswamy in about 150 CE, although its construction could be much older.

In any case, the relief sculpture is not a modern addition. Only normal repairs, no renovations or new artwork, were undertaken at the temple in recorded history, according to Indian researcher Praveen Mohar. He also points out that the anomalous bike rider could only have been carved when the stone on which he appears was horizontal, before subsequently being installed to its present vertical position when Panchavarnaswamy was being built millennia ago.² Baron Karl von Drais, a civil servant in Baden, Germany, was supposed to have built the first bicycle in 1817. Yet his invention was preceded by nineteen hundred years or more in ancient India.

Figure I.1. The Panchavarnaswamy Temple bicycle. Photo by Bongan.

In 1999 archaeologists excavating a newly opened Aztec burial site in Mexico City uncovered the remains of a decapitated twenty-yearold sacrificial victim clutching baked-clay objects, one in either hand. Dated to circa 1450 CE, they were small whistles of a kind never before encountered anywhere. When blown, their loud sound was indistinguishable from a man screaming in terrible agony. Since their discovery, many similar so-called death whistles have come to light across Central America (fig. I.2, p. 4). Remarkably, no two are identical. They generate the realistic shrieks of men, women, or children; each one is unique, as though re-creating the voices of particular individuals. Other Mesoamerican whistles reproduce the sounds of jaguars, birds, and a variety of jungle animals with uncanny accuracy.

Scientific laboratory research into these wind instruments reveals their subtle, interior construction, but precisely how the little sound chambers are capable of making such loud, lifelike humanand animallike cries has not been determined.

A couple of these instruments we found were broken, archaeologist Paul Healy told the Associated Press, which was great, because we could actually see the construction of them, the actual technology of building a sound chamber out of paper-thin clay. Still, [the source production of] their exact sounds will likely remain a mystery. Originally, the whistles may have emitted terrifying sounds to fend off enemies, much like high-tech crowd-control devices available today.³

They may have been used as psychological weapons when blown simultaneously by hundreds or even thousands of warriors prior to an attack, some researchers speculate.⁴ Spanish conquistadors fighting the Aztecs did recount the occasional sound of enemy whistles, but never in large numbers. Given that the whistles were found with a sacrificial victim who had been decapitated, the whistles could have been used in religious ceremonies. However they were employed, the six-hundredyear-old death whistles reproduce natural sounds with an exactness not equaled until the advent of modern recording technology.

Figure I.2. An Aztec death whistle. Photo by Tim Evanson.

Another ancient American innovation dates back some twelve thousand years before Asian migrations crossed the Barents Sea land bridge from Siberia into Alaska. Among the hazards presented by their new home in the Arctic was snow blindness, a visual condition caused by relentlessly bright sunlight reflecting off seemingly limitless fields of snow and ice. To protect themselves from this environmental hazard, countless generations of resident Inuit inhabitants resorted to the world’s first snow goggles. These were made of driftwood, antler, or bone to completely cover the eyes save for thin, horizontal slits through which the wearer could see sufficiently to travel through the polar landscape without jeopardizing their sight.⁵

Figure I.3. Inuit goggles protect the eyes from glare reflected from ice and snow by the sun.

In 2018 a rare specimen of forty-thousand-year-old jewelry was discovered in eastern Russia (see plate 1 for examples). Atlantis Rising magazine reported that an artificial hole in the Siberian chlorite bracelet required a high-speed drill to create, using a tool thirty thousand years ahead of its time.⁶ Such a find contradicts mainstream archaeological opinion that denies that ancient man experienced anything more than the most rudimentary material culture. But the Ice Age bangle is only among the most recent examples of surprisingly sophisticated technology invented centuries, even millennia, before the advent of our so-called Modern Age.

The many marvels of technology being uncovered around the globe, the better and the lesser well known, naturally sort themselves into two fundamental categories: those that were ahead of their time and those, incredibly, that were ahead of our time. Typical specimens of the former category, technology more advanced than even twenty-first-century applied science, include seventh-century Hindu bicycles, an Ice Age bracelet made with a power tool, and Babylon’s phosphorus matches from the second millennium BCE, all cited above.

Forthcoming examples of the ancient world’s superior technology include Roman concrete, the Incas’ earthquake-proof architecture, Egyptian cancer cures, Imperial China’s efficient and free public health care, fifth-century India’s rust-free iron pillar, history’s longest floating bridge built by Persian engineers, Turkey’s underground cities for tens of thousands of residents, Persian refrigerators, Peruvian aquifers, and a Chinese reservoir. All are still in service after more than a thousand years of continuous use. They represent just a few of the past achievements modern civilization has yet to duplicate.

1

Automation

With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the devil.

ELON MUSK, INTERVIEW AT MIT’S AERONAUTICS AND ASTRONAUTICS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION

Artificial intelligence is the iconic controversy of our times. Yet complex, even sophisticated robotics is not unique to early twenty-first-century technology. Original, surprisingly ingenious examples were actually built and operated by long-lost civilizations many thousands of years ago. Some android specimens were perhaps more advanced than current levels of applied science, as documented by a pair of Roman-era texts that describe hundreds of different kinds of machines capable of independent movement.

Sometime before 70 CE, Pneumatica and Automata were authored by Heron of Alexandria, a teacher at the city’s museum, adjacent to the famous library, where most of his surviving writings appear as lecture notes for courses in mathematics, mechanics, physics, and pneumatics.¹ Although the field was not formalized until this past century, Heron’s devices formed the first formal research into cybernetics.

For example, self-driving vehicles are at the cutting edge of contemporary technology, but Heron built a programmable, self-propelled cart powered by a falling weight nearly two thousand years ago. Its program consisted of strings wrapped around the drive axle. Heron also invented many automated props and devices for the Greek theater, including a mechanical play. His three-wheeled special-effects platform carried other robots onto to the stage, where they performed in front of audiences.

The contraption was powered by a binary-like system of ropes and knots and operated by a rotating, cylindrical cogwheel, while dropping mechanically timed metal balls onto a hidden drum to replicate the sound of thunder. A falling weight pulled a rope wrapped around the moving platform’s two independent axles. Varying the length of the rope that was wound around each axle enabled Heron to program different routines for the performing robots before each show. Noel Sharkey, a computer scientist at Britain’s University of Sheffield, relates this control system to modern-day binary programming.²

Regarded today as the outstanding researcher of antiquity, Heron was not, however, the earliest genius of his kind. He was preceded by another Greek, the father of robotics, Ctesibius. Inventor of the pipe organ in the third century BCE, Ctesibius went on to construct a camoperated automaton resembling a god that alternatively stood up and sat down during public processions. Oxford University physicist Asim Qureshi states that later ancient engineers used his [Ctesibius’s] techniques on hydraulic systems.³

Between 806 and 820 CE, the Japanese inventor Han Zhile moved to China, where he was employed by the imperial court to create mechanical birds, phoenixes, cranes, crows, and magpies, according to medical researchers Ashok Kumar Hemal and Mani Meno. Though built of wood, some of the ornithological prototypes could be made to pretend to eat, drink, chirp, and warble like real birds. He is reported to have installed mechanical devices inside some of the birds to drive their wings to make them fly. He also created a mechanical cat.⁴

Chinese cybernetics was known as khwai-shuh from at least the first century. In the words of Andrew Tomas (1906–2001), a well-known Russian-born investigator into ancient technology, it was an art by means of which a statue was brought to life to serve its maker.⁵ An early example was a wooden humanoid atop a robotic cart, developed by Zhang Heng (78–139 CE), that pounded a drum when the selfpropelled vehicle had traveled ten li (3.7 miles) and struck a bell at the one-hundred-li mark.⁶

Another humanoid was fashioned into the likeness of a Buddhist monk by an early Tang Dynasty craftsman circa 620 CE. Yang Wulian’s creation begged for alms, which were deposited in a copper bowl. When the bowl was full, the animated figure bowed humbly, then deposited the offerings into a treasure chest.⁷

According to Hemal and Meno, Yin Wenliang, a late fifth-century mechanical engineer from Luozhou created a wooden man and dressed him with an outfit made of colorful worsted silk. At every banquet, the small wooden man would propose a toast to each guest in order. Yin Wenliang also made a wooden woman. She could play the sheng [an ancient Chinese pipe with thirteen reeds] and sing, and she did them in perfect rhythm. If a guest did not finish the wine in his cup, the wooden man wouldn’t refill the cup. If a guest did not drink enough wine, the wooden singing girl would play the sheng and sing for him to urge him to drink more.⁸

Yin Wenliang’s contemporary Dafeng Ma was a skilled designer and constructed an automated dresser for the empress. Whenever the empress opened a full-length mirror, a robotic female brought washing paraphernalia and towels. When the towel was removed from the artificial servant’s arm, it automatically triggered the machine to back away into a closet and deactivate itself.⁹ Another mechanical domestic was commissioned by Ta-chouan, whose wife was overly impressed by the well-endowed male figure who was programmed to erotically service her when the emperor was away on state business. He eventually learned of the empress’s bionic infidelity, destroyed the cuckolding automaton, and had its inventor beheaded.¹⁰ Hers was not the first sex robot, however.

More than six hundred years earlier, Nabis, Sparta’s monarch from 207 to 192 BCE, invented a lifelike reproduction of his famously beautiful wife after her death, concealing it from public knowledge by making it a state secret. Dressed in regal robes, the replica was a mirror image of the deceased Apega, controlled from a concealed nearby location by the king himself through hidden devices.¹¹ Whenever a delinquent debtor was summoned to the palace, the deadbeat borrower was lavished with enough wine to inebriate his critical faculties, which might have otherwise detected any artificiality, then ushered into what the tipsy victim imagined was a private audience with the living Apega. Her automated likeness seductively welcomed the unwary defaulter with open arms. But as soon as he entered her, they sprang shut and pressed him ever tighter against her steel torso, studded with iron nails, from which there was no escape. Only when the tortured creditor loudly swore to pay up was his android queen’s excruciating embrace released. This effective government revenue collection agent was described by Polybius, a no-nonsense historian of early Roman history and a contemporary of Nabis himself. The Spartan ruler’s automaton was one of the advancements in technology of the ancient Greco-Roman world, according to his Wikipedia entry.¹²

A thousand years before, during the Trojan War on the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey, the widowed Laodamia made a bronze likeness of her [deceased] husband, Protesilaus, put it in her room under pretense of sacred rites, and devoted herself to it, according to Gaius Julius Hyginus, a Latin author and superintendent of the Palatine library under Caesar Augustus. A servant looked through a crack in the door and saw her holding the simulacrum of Protesilaus in her embrace and kissing it. Thinking she had a lover, he told her father, Acastus. When he came and burst into the room, he saw the likeness of Protesilaus. To put an end to her torture, he had it and the sacred offerings burned on a pyre he had made, but Laodamia, not enduring her grief, threw herself on it and was burned to death.¹³

Figure 1.1. The profile of King Nabis appears on an early second-century Greek coin. Nabis created an automaton to seduce debtors and torture them until they paid everything they owed to the king.

Ling Zhao’s mid-sixth-century robots were likewise remarkable for their lifelike appearance, especially their skin and hair texture. Court historian Ming Xin told of how the Qi Dynasty monk from northern China dug a pleasure pool at the base of a mountain on the orders of Emperor Wu Cheng. After the pool was finished, Ling Zhao built a miniature boat with exquisite details and put it in the water. When the miniature boat flowed before the emperor, he took a wine cup from it, and the boat would stop automatically. Then the small wooden man on the boat would clap its hands, and the boat would start to play music. When Emperor Wu Cheng finished drinking and put down the wine cup, the small wooden man would take the cup back to the boat. If Emperor Wu Cheng did not finish drinking the wine in the cup, the boat would stay there and would not leave.¹⁴

Ling Zhao’s earlier colleague Lan Ling fashioned a robot that could dance. As related by a mid-sixth-century text, the Chao Ye Qian Zai: When the king wanted to offer a drink to a man, the robot would turn to that man and bow to the man with the drink in his hand.¹⁵

Lan Ling’s lifelike wine servant was long preceded by the works of the Greek Philon of Byzantium (from the third century BCE), known as Mechanicus because of his impressive engineering accomplishments. These inventions included an automaton in the form of a life-size woman. In her right hand, she held a wine jug. When a cup was placed in the palm of her left hand, she automatically poured wine first and then water to achieve the right mix. Both the wine and water were stored in metal jugs suspended in her chest.¹⁶ Detailed in Philon’s large treatise, Mechanike syntaxis (Compendium of Mechanics), the automaton’s precise replica appeared in 2017 at an exhibition called Amazing Inventions of the Ancient Greeks, featured by the Herakleidon Museum annex on Apostolou Pavlou Street in central Athens. Like Heron of Alexandria mentioned above, Philon created an automated theater that dramatized the plots of popular myths with moving images, sound effects, and animated visuals. Interestingly, Lan Ling’s automaton looked like a man of a non-Chinese ethnic group, suggesting its foreign origins, which may have gone back very far indeed.¹⁷

ATLANTEAN ORIGINS OF AUTOMATION

While many examples of automation have been found in Rome and China, some may have been lost in the sea. Chapter 7 of the Old Testament repeats an ancient Egyptian myth of possible predynastic provenance describing the younger brother of Osiris, Rocail, who lived before a great flood had obliterated early civilization: Rocail erected an enormous sepulcher adorned with statues of various metals, made by talismanic art, which moved and spake, and acted like living men.¹⁸

The apparently Atlantean implications of Rocail’s advanced technology having been overwhelmed by a predynastic deluge are not confined to biblical origins. Theosophical researcher David Reigle writes:

In an account of the sinking of Atlantis, taken from a secret commentary and given by H. P. Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine, a kind of robot is mentioned (S.D. vol. 2, pp. 427–428). It is there called a speaking animal or speaking beast. In a footnote, Blavatsky reports that, according to the accounts, these were artificially made beasts, mechanical animals. In another footnote, Blavatsky reports that, according to Brahmachari Bawa [a late nineteenth-century Hindu scholar], extensive Sanskrit treatises on such subjects once existed but are now lost.

There is an existing Pali text, Loka-paññatti, Description of the World, that is largely based on lost Sanskrit texts [La Lokapaññatti et les idées cosmologiques du bouddhisme ancien, by Eugène Denis, 2 volumes, 1977. For the story of the robots, see the Pali text, pp. 157–59, and the French translation, pp. 141–43.]. It refers to such a robot in the words bhūta-vāhana-yanta (Sanskrit: bhūta-vāhana-yantra), literally, elemental vehicle machine. These elemental-driven machines in the account given in the Loka-paññatti are used to protect the relics of the Buddha.¹⁹

ROBOTIC WARRIORS

If artificial intelligence did originate in Atlantis, something of its antediluvian roots may echo in the oldest mythic reference of Western Europe’s Classical epoch. Talos, a robotic guard, appears in the Argonautica, an epic poem describing Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece (see plate 3). When he and his Argonaut followers approached the island of Crete by boat, they were bombarded by boulders hurled at them by a bronze warrior programmed to protect the Aegean island from all outsiders by patrolling its shores three times daily. The Argonauts nonetheless made landfall and overcame their giant opponent when Jason’s soon-to-be-betrayed fiancée, Medea, pulled a bronze nail out of the defending automaton’s heel. From it gushed a fluid known as ichor, draining this vital blood of the gods from Talos until he collapsed into a heap of broken, lifeless metal.

In modern terms, observes Popular Electronics’ reporter William Tenn, that single vein could have been his main power cable and the pin, his fuse. He describes Talos as a weapons-alert system and guided missile in one package.²⁰How Stuff Works writer Robert Lamb concurs.

Talos is far more than a mere curio amid other tales of gods and heroes. While myths can reveal much about history and culture, this episode also concerns the nature of technology. In its towering stature, we see the elite nature of bronze craftsmanship at the time, as well as the military prowess of bronze weaponry. It was an age of peak bronze technology. Talos is something special, even to modern humans. He’s the embodiment of technological achievement and divine power intertwined in a single mythic being. . . . Talos is remarkably futuristic, anticipating the scientific possibilities of the present age, and, even then, belonging more with the bizarre imaginings of the new mythology of science fiction than with the mechanisms created and used in real life. This killer robot stares back at us from the mists of ancient human civilization, reflecting the attitudes of its time, but also challenging us to consider the ramifications of artistic and technological creation. What are the limits of the modern Talos’ might? Despite the never-ending onslaught of sci-fi killer robots, these questions remain as enthralling as ever.²¹

Such timelessness applies as much to their modern significance as to their origins. Although Classical scholars have dated composition of the Argonautica from 283 to 221 BCE, the basic story was already well known to Hellenistic audiences, which enabled Apollonius [Apollonius Rhodius] to go beyond a simple narrative, giving it a scholarly emphasis suitable to the times, writes Robert Lamb. It was the age of the great Library of Alexandria, when Heron of Alexandria was himself at work on his robotic creations. On one hand, states Lamb, Talos stands as a potential metaphor for the might of bronze technology during the Greek Bronze Age, stretching from 3200 to 1200 BCE²²

In fact, some versions of Talos portray him as the last survivor of an ancient race of bronze-era men, or rather the last survivors of the Late Bronze Age. In Linear B, the ancient Cretan language, Talos was synonymous for the Sun, and the Minoans worshipped Zeus as Zeus Tallaios. Tallaia is the Linear B name (perhaps derived from the older, still untranslatable Minoan Linear A) for a spur of the Ida mountain range where the Zeus cult was centered high up Mount Ida inside his cathedral-like cave, known as the Ideon Antron, or Navel of the World. Detailed representations of Talos preceded the Argonautica by at least 150 years on Greek vase paintings and Etruscan mirrors. His depiction on a Cretan coin from Phaistos is particularly significant because it was from the ruins of this large city that a baked-clay disc impressed with the earliest known example of movable type was retrieved. Dated to the Middle Minoan Bronze Age, it is two thousand years ahead of the same process reinvented by Johannes Gutenberg circa 1450.

Considering his associations with Crete, Talos may be regarded within the context of similarly advanced examples of ancient technology discovered there, an observation tending to affirm his actual existence during antiquity. Indeed, innovations such as a flush toilet found at Knossos, the centerpiece of Crete’s pre-Classical urban center, and the Antikythera astronomical computer found nineteen nautical miles northwest of Crete, establish the conception of Talos long before the Argonautica was composed and well into the Bronze Age, which he appears to have personified. He was originally perhaps a kind of technologically advanced device built for military purposes.

MAN VS. MACHINE: A PERENNIAL CONFLICT

If weaponized robots are as much dreaded today as their application was in antiquity, another anxious concern regarding the immediate future of artificial intelligence is its forecast capability for determining, programming, and enforcing its own concept of world government. That function was also prefigured by ancient robotics as long ago as 1100 BCE, when moving statues were documented by New Kingdom priests of Amun during the late Twentieth Dynasty. This was a tumultuous period of mixed crisis and innovation, when Pharaoh Ramses III successfully defended the Nile delta from a massive invasion by the Atlantean-like Meshwesh, also known as Sea Peoples, followed by the construction of his stupendous Victory Temple at Medinet Habu in Lower Egypt.

After Pharaoh’s assassination, the moving statues reportedly chose his successor, Amun-her-khepeshef (meaning Amun [king of the gods] is with His Strong Arm), from male members of the royal family, just as today’s super computers engage in America’s modern presidential election campaigns, predicting and, as some observers believe, helping to predetermine their outcome. Qureshi declares that it is entirely possible that these [3,100-year-old] artifacts were built. . . . Ancient Egyptians had enough knowledge of mechanics to develop a nondigitized machine based on a system of ropes and pulleys.²³

They certainly were interested in advanced possibilities for such artificial intelligence, envisioning (at least) our own modern concerns regarding automated soldiers. An early Egyptian story tells of Nubia’s humanoid commando unit sent to abduct the pharaoh. After his return to Egypt, he dispatched his own robotic SWAT team to retaliate by kidnapping the Nubian king. During the course of their man-versusandroid confrontations, futuristic flamethrowers and even plasma weapons were deployed. This story, The Tale of Say-Ausar, resembles modern science fiction. But all good science fiction must be based, at least in part, on real science familiar to audiences, a point that begs the question: What generally recognizable science could ordinary Egyptians have taken for granted five thousand years ago that would have been necessary for making The Tale of Say-Ausar credible? If nothing else, its synthetic warriors reflect modern-day suspicions about civilization’s growing dependence on artificial intelligence, particularly when militarized.

Similar angst also arose from Han Zhile’s automated animals in about 800 CE. His robotic menagerie of lifelike birds made to amuse mid–Tang Dynasty Chinese royalty prompted a contemporaneous cautionary story rewritten by Hans Christian Andersen in an 1843 fairy tale, which in turn inspired Igor Stravinsky seventy-four years later to compose his symphonic poem, Le chant du rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale). It tells of a Chinese emperor who, from childhood, dearly loved his pet nightingale, which returned his deep affection. One day, a visiting sorcerer presented a remarkable gift to his majesty: a mechanical nightingale that sang, flapped its wings, strutted and danced, and even took food in its beak from the emperor’s own hand. He was so taken with this miraculous invention that he forgot about the real bird who had been his closest companion for so many years. Eventually, the monarch realized with a shock that his living nightingale had disappeared. Days, weeks, and months passed, but it failed to return through the palace window that was always left open and at which plates of food and water were placed.

The emperor sickened with regret for his vanished friend and could no longer bear to look at its robotic replacement, so he gave it away. As summer merged into fall and he realized that his feathered friend would never return, the monarch fell ill with regret and took to his bed, where he constantly watched the open window. At length, he began to die of grief and was closing his eyes for a final sleep when, incredibly, he heard his nightingale singing from the windowsill. A moment later, the bird landed upon his breast, still singing. The emperor quickly recovered and, together with the nightingale, lived a long, happy life.

This ancient tale demonstrates the potential for dehumanization posed by our distraction with and growing reliance on not only artificial intelligence but also technology itself.